Vietnam's strategic thinking during the third indochina war

 INTODUCTION 

1  impact the Economic Crisis 1975-1979

2 the decision to invade cambodia , december 1979 

3 Mobilization for a Two-Front war,  1979-1981

4  The Two-faced Enemy in Cambodia, 1979-1985 

5 Economic Regionalism in Indochina, 1982-1985

6   The Road to Doi Moi, 1986 

     in late 1978 Vietnam invaded Cambodia, toppling a pro-China regime, Demo-cratic Kampuchea (DK), and installing a new pro-Vietnam regime, the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) . The decision to invade was a consequential one. Even as it ended the Cambodia genocide, it  also triggered a wide Third Indochina war between Vietnam , backed by the Soviet Union, and Cambodia DK, with its great power ally China .

   Why did Vietnam decide to engage in a costly program of regime change and national building and why did these efforts ultimately fail to establish a loyal client state in Cambodia in the 1980s? And what factors contributed to Vietnam's later decision to reconciliation with China in the late 1980s? Within the debate over Vietnam's foreign policy decision making during the third Indochina war, there is an unresolved question about whether the invasion of Cambodia was rational or irrational . To some western scholars, Hanoi's decision to in-vade Cambodia Can only be explained y irrational factors, including Marxist-Leninist ideology or Vietnam imperial ambition for the domination of Indo-China engrained in Vietnam elites political culture. Yet a careful analysis of previously inaccessible archival materials produced by the Vietnam's  government during that time challenges this line of argument and reveals how domestic imperatives and competing views between factions within the Vietnamese leadership influenced the country domestic ad foreign policy .

 Internal reports and publications circulated within the top leadership of the Vietnamese party and government at that time, together with memoirs and other Vietnam -language material ,show that Hano's decision to invade,​ Cambodia was driven by a rational need to address several pressing issues; an economic crisis at home ,continuing military attacks on Vietnamese soil by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge forces, and the Chinese threat to the north. The Vietnamese leader's decision was a strategic one motivated by their belief that it would ensure full military and political support from Vietnam's great power ally, the led Council of Mutual Economic Assistance; and raise Vietnam's international standing in the Soviet -led socialist camp. By cementing its alliance with the So-Viet Union, they reasoned, Vietnam would solve its domestic crisis at home and leaders thus came to view war as a cure-all that would resolve the country's economic crisis , reduce external threats to its territorial sovereignty, and solidity its alliances.

    In addition to providing a crucial Vietnamese perspective on the decision to invade Cambodia, this book contributes to emerging scholarship on the shift in the Vietnamese political elite's thinking from the doctrinal Marxist-Leninist ideology during the last decade of the Cold War to the reform and opening of the post-Cold War ear. During the decade-long war that had begun with DK esca-lating its attacks on Vietnam in early 1977, that shift in the Vietnamese leader-ship's strategic thinking was remarkable and transformative-that is, from a focus on socialist economic reconstruction and modernization at the Fourth Part Congress in December 1976 to a war decision in early 1978, fighting combined with offensive diplomacy to isolate China in 1984, and then to economic reform and opening, dubbed Doi Moi  (renovation) , at the Sixth Party Congress in 1986 in conjunction with the Vietnam-initiated process of recon-ciliation with china .

       This book has three aims. First , it provides a political history of Vietnam's post-1975 economic crisis, and its invasion and occupation of Cambodia (1978-89), crafted based  on a novel reinterpretation of Vietnam's motives for the war and regime change in Cambodia .in so doing the book reveals historical details concerning hidden private information about internal deliberations within Vietnam's foreign-policy-making circle .

   Second, this book offers an explanation for major shifts in the Vietnamese leadership's strategic thinking from the onset to the conclusion of the Third Indo-China war, with emphasis on the influence of collective idea on foreign policy. Unlike most existing scholarship , this book reveals hidden internal struggles between power groups within the Vietnamese government's collective policy-making structure rather than a monolithic  and consensual decision-making body. At the heart of his fierce competition to dominate Vietnam's foreign policy are members of the conservative camp( conservative and military-firsters) 1 who drew their power from militarism and Marxist -Leninist ortho-doxy. On the other side were those in the reformist camp ( economically minded leaders and economy-firsters ) who advocated a gradual shift from a state-planned to a market-based economy and a broad-based foreign economic policy.2

Third, this book illustrates a crucial case of why a small state like Vietnam pursued war against a much more powerful alliance in an asymmetric conflict, as well as how a small country mobilized state resources.3 Vietnam's decision to invade Cambodia qualifies as a crucial case of asymmetric war in which a weaker state, Vietnam Sino-Cambodia alliance. Vietnam was undoubtedly a pivotal actor in the war , and yet the Vietnamese leadership's strategic thinking behind its war decision remains elusive. Prior to Vietnam's massive military intervention in Cambodia in December 1978 and the subsequent invasion of Vietnam by China in February 1979, Vietnam feared a continuation or deterioration of the status quo of reciprocal military conflict along the Cambodia-Vietnamese border into a Sino-Cambodia-coordinated two-front war against Vietnam. Domestically ,meanwhile , the economic crisis in Vietnam itself threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the Communist party of Vietnam (CPV), which in turn emboldened the militant conservative faction of the country's leadership to churn Vietnam's war machine and turn to the open arms of the Soviet Union to gain economic and military support for its new war.

     More broadly, an understanding of Vietnam's war and foreign policy decision making sheds light on the impact of revolutions and wars on Vietnam's national strategic culture. Vietnam's current foreign policy executive continues to build on traditional strategic thinking and a two-millennia-old national of defending its sovereignty against foreign invaders. , as its predecessors did during the military conflict with China in the 1980s following three decades of national resistance against French colonialism and American imperialism. Hence, this book both addresses a critical need for insight into the closely guarded " black box" of Vietnam's foreign policy decision making and contributes to the existing scholarship on the influence of idea on foreign policy.

    Previous Scholarship

Several excellent scholarly works have addressed these topics,  notably Tuong Vu's Vietnam's communist Revolution ( 2016) and David W.P Elliott's Changing worlds ( 2012 ). Vu argue that Marxist-Leninist ideology, in spite of periodic moderation, was the most important driver of Vietnam's foreign policy in the 1970a and 1980s . Elliott argues, however, that the re was an internal disagreement between the conservative , who favored security and military capabilities, and the reformists, ,who advocated performance-based legitimacy based on economic development. He contends that the transformative ideological shifts among Vietnamese political elites in the 1980s let to the CPV's rejection of the Marxist central-panning model and the decision to replace military confrontation with economic integration and engagement with the changing world .

  vu's book largely relied on publicly available party documents including the fifty-four volumes of Van kien Dang toa toan Tap (Collected party documents) as formation in their own right, especially for the study of the CPV leader's thoughts, they do   not reveal internal debates as completely as internally circulated meeting minutes and reports do. Elliott primarily relied on publicly avaible sources written in Vietnamese supplemented with the memories of Vietnamese leaders and interviews with various former officials of the government. This study, however, largely relies on primary sources ( archival documents produces by the Vietnamese government at the times when events were unfolding and actor's decisions were being made) 4  Elliott's Changing worlds  differs from my book in terms of temporality -this is, his book focuses on Vietnam's post-Cold War transformation from 1989 to 2005, not the critical period of 1975 to 1989 that this book covers. Simply put, this book fills the gap that precedes Elliott's work  the main debate in the existing scholarship on Vietnam's foreign policy decision making had been between social constructivists, who emphasize ideological and historical-cultural factors ( Marist -Leninist ideology and political culture), and realists, who stress material forces ( domestic and external opportunities and constraints ), as the main drivers. Political scientist Tuong Vu argues that ideology is the overriding explanation for Vietnam for Vietnam's foreign policy from the decision of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV ) to join the soviet bloc in 1948 to Vietnams' normalization of relations with China in 1991 .5 For Vu from mid  1976 to the late 1980s, in spite of some pragmatism in foreign policy and changes in the leadership, " The Vietnamese revolution by no means veered from doctrinal orthodoxy directed from Moscow." 6 Back then , Vietnam in Vu's view, could not imagine a future outside the Soviet bloc . Stephen Morris contended that Hanoi's decision to invade Cambodia in December 1978 was an irrational one and therefore can only be explained by irrational factors, including Marxist-Leninist ideology and Vietnam's imperial ambition for domination of Indochina engrained in Vietnamese elites' political culture. 7 However, as international relations scholar David W.P Elliott observes, " Vietnam's rulers have traditionally viewed international relations in starkly realist terms.... Vietnam's strategic thinking until quite recently has been almost exclusively focused n how to defuse the threat from a larger power and how to manipulate power balances to best in order to defend its own territory, Sovereignty, and independence- the emotional slogan that galvanized Vietnam's political class in 1945 and continues to resonate in today's interdependent world " 8

  In Contrast to arguments that privilege ideological and irrational factors in Vietnamese decision making, my findings illuminate the " starkly realist terms" noted by Elliott. Hanoi's leader I argue, proceeded in accordance with what T. V paul describes as " subjective rationality, " wherein " The Values, beliefs , and expectations of a decision-maker are important factors that determine his probabilistic , assessment before he undertakes a course of action. " 9  in such a conception, " a course of action is rational only relative to possessed body of information ( beliefs and desires ) in terms of  which the merits of the available courses of action can be rationally evaluated. " 10  At each step in their decision making process, Vietnamese leaders rationally evaluated their available courses of action as these were informed by their values, beliefs , expectations, and desires.

     Analytical Framework  

Drawing on the neoclassical realist theory of international relations as an analytical framework for Vietnam's foreign policy decision making, this study challenges this line of argument, which privileges ideological and historical-cultural factors by showing how domestic and external imperatives not only spurred competing ideas of how to achieve national security and economic development between the two main factions within the Vietnamese leadership but also caused one se

This study posits that decisions to pursue war and peace were made by decision-making elites with external and internal motives. As Paul stated, "War decisions are conditional, perception-dependent, and time-dependent, i.e., wars are initiated when favorable conditions are perceived by decision-makers who may pursue the war path for attaining their domestic and international goals." This approach to domestic politics and foreign policy decision making incorporated the worldviews, positions, and interests of decision-making elites (e.g., economic, diplomatic, and military leaders) within the constraints and opportunities of evolving domestic and international correlations of forces. Joe D. Hagan calls this "domestic political explanations of foreign policy"—

what Robert D. Putnam calls "two-level games," in which leaders cope simultaneously with the pressures and constraints of their own domestic political systems, as well as with those of the international environment. In spite of the notable exception of Elliott's Changing Worlds, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen's Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War (2012), and Pierre Asselin's Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War (2013), previous studies centered on Marxist-Leninist ideology or political culture and thus treated the Vietnamese leadership as a monolithic political organization that did not therefore neglected impact on domestic and foreign policy decision making, coalition building for infusing foreign policy, and the reformists/conservatives/military-firsters in the decision-making structure of the Vietnamese party and government.

Who are the decision-making elites in this study? This book focuses on three organizational levels of decision making, namely, the Politburo (top policy makers), the Central Military Commission (CMC), and the Prime Minister's Office (executive body), and ministerial leadership (senior policy implementers, evaluators, and advisers in the executive body) at the policy input level. The most important decisions in the late 1970s and first half of the 1980s were made collectively by the Politburo of the Party Central Committee, which was dominated by the five long-standing leaders of the party and government, namely, Le Duan, Truong Chinh, Pham Van Dong, and Le Duc Tho. However, power groups of political elites, from ministers and vice-ministers to general directors of departments or directorates, members of interministerial committees, and senior leaders of the Prime Minister's Office, provided important policy input, through a variety of research and intelligence-gathering activities, to top decision makers of the Standing Committee of the Government Council headed by the prime minister.

With respect to Vietnam’s regime change in Cambodia, Hanoi relied most on the vice-ministers of various ministries who, as advisers to their Cambodian counterparts, played critical roles in shaping Cambodia's domestic and foreign policy. They were the ones who conducted assessments, produced reports, and made recommendations to the top leadership. To be more specific, in addition to Unit 478 (the committee in charge of military advisers) under the supervision of B68 (the committee that represented the Party Central Committee on Cambodia affairs) and A40 (committee in charge of economic, educational, and cultural advisers), the vice-ministers of each ministry directly served in Cambodia as close advisers to their Cambodian counterparts within the PRK government. On January 24, 1979, the Ministry of Defense issued Decision No. 30 to detach Unit 478 from B68 and placed it under direct supervision of the

Ministry of Defense. However, Unit 478 continued to work closely with B68 of the Party Central Committee. The reports from these committees to Hanoi provided valuable information about Hanoi's policy toward Cambodia. In 1979–80, when Vietnam was conducting a two-front war in Cambodia and China on top of the growing economic crisis at home, two contending factions emerged in the CPV. These factions coalesced around the vital question of national security. The military-first conservative faction continued to push for military confrontation at all costs to defeat “Chinese expansionism” while relying on the Soviet bloc for political and material support. On the contrary, the economy-first reformist faction advocated the balanced use of resources for economic development and national defense, with a focus on economic over military threats to Vietnam’s national security. In terms of foreign policy, this faction, especially Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, argued for gradual withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia, a necessary condition for de-escalation of the conflict with China and opening a dialogue with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to assure that Vietnam was not a threat to Thailand. He also argued for a broad-based economic foreign policy that would expand economic relations with the West.

In 1979, the leaders of the military-first conservative faction were General Secretary Le Duan and party organizational chief Le Duc Tho, who had dominated the party since their successful push for national unification through war in 1959. Under the Fifth Party Congress in March 1982, the real power was held by the five oldest Politburo members mentioned above and all were more than seventy years old. Within this inner circle, real power was in the hands of General Secretary Le Duan and his powerful allies Le Duc Tho and Pham Hung, who were the leaders of the military-first conservative faction with personal ties going back to 1958-59 when they advocated unification through war in opposition to the moderate faction's preference for unification through political-economic transition—that is, the socialist development of North Vietnam's economy, which it was believed would ultimately defeat the South.

Back then the moderate North-first faction of the party included Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, Deputy Prime Minister Le Thanh Nghi, and General Vo Nguyen Giap, and they wielded power within the executive. However, Duan and Tho controlled the key appointments to the most important ministries, departments, and other bodies, especially the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of National Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), Ministry of Transportation and Communications, State Planning Committee, and General Directorate and General Logistics Department of the People's Army of Vietnam.

PAVN General Van Tien Dung, General Chu Huy Man, and General Do Muoi were key members of this faction, and they dominated the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam in December 1978.

The economy-minded leaders were Deputy Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, Deputy Prime Minister Le Thanh Nghi, and Deputy Prime Minister Vo Nguyen Giap, but they were not pro-market, with the notable exception of Le Thanh Nghi, who favored decentralizing economic planning in the aftermath of the severe economic crisis in 1978. As Hanoi's top economic planner after the Fourth Party Congress of December 1976, Le Thanh Nghi warned the Politburo about the dangers of the wasteful use of resources and economic inefficiency inherent in the state central planning. Although Nghi was not a champion of market economy reforms, in 1978 he fired the first shot warning the party about a worsening economic calamity if Vietnam failed to improve its economic efficiency and rapidly increase its exports in order to import modern industrial equipment and important raw materials.

By mid-1980s, the increasingly heavy cost of the protracted two-front war in Cambodia and against China weakened the conservatives/military-firsters faction within the CPV and elevated early reformers/economy-firsters. 25 The latter received strong support from the "chief ideologist of the party, Truong Chinh who Elliott called one of the "unlikely reformers"—and were appointed to prominent positions in the Vietnamese party and government. 26 In the first half of the 1980s, Truong Chinh, Nguyen Van Linh, Vo Van Kiet, Tran Phuong, and Nguyen Co Thach became the leaders of the reformists. Simultaneously, the "new thinking" 28 under the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev, which rejected the Stalinist bipolar worldview of the "two camps" socialist and imperialist—and replaced it with the idea of world interdependence, lent support to the reformists within the Vietnamese government, allowing them to thrust their own " new thinking "  version of " doi moi Tu duy or renovation of thinking into foreign policy decision making in  1986.

                Sources and Method of Analysis 

Adopting an inductive analysis approach to Vietnamese archival documents, I set out to accomplish two main tasks. First, my interpretive task was to determine the parameters of Vietnam's national interests and priorities as defined by the Vietnamese Political elites. Second, I traced the ways in which a specific elite group's foreign policy ideas became dominant in internal debates within The Vietnamese leadership with a careful analysis of the influence of domestic and external forces in mediating the rise and fall of competing strategic ideas at different periods. I relied on a large volume of internal reports circulated among the top leadership of the Vietnamese party and government at that time and now housed at National Archive No. 3 in Hanoi. The data I used for this book were official records of the Vietnamese government used in this study is superior to internal party documents and memoirs used in the existing scholarship mentioned above. In addition, I also used selected internally circulated (luu hanh noi bo) publications and unpublished sources, including memoirs and diaries from names in Vietnamese, as they provide useful corroborating information on Vietnam's domestic and foreign policy considerations during the Third Indochina War.

Since 2006 I have made five trips to Vietnam, conducting research at the National Archives No. 3 in Hanoi. Most of the archival documents I used to write this book came from various state collections, including the Prime Minister's Office (the Phu Thu Tuong, or PTT, collection), the National Assembly Office (the Phong Quoc Hoi, or QH, collection), the State Planning Committee, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Transport, and the Ministry of Materials Supply. Notably, the PTT collection is the most important one for this book. This executive office was the central point where reports were sent vertically between top party and government leaders and those at the policy input levels, as well horizontally between the concerned ministries, with copies sent to the prime minister. For instance, the PTT collection contains internal reports circulated through the Prime Minister's Office from MOFA, Ministry of Defense (MoD), National Border Commission, State Planning Committee, and special committees such as B68, chaired by Le Du Tho in 1979–80, and A40, chaired by Nguyen Con. In addition, reports by the provincial people's committees and foreign affairs committees reveal details concerning espionage activities, border skirmishes, refugees, and local socioeconomic and political situations, adding a local perspective on major events and conditions that influenced domestic and foreign policy at the national level.

In addition, the QH collection belonging to the National Assembly contains revealing information about the party and government’s major decisions and policies and reports on their implementation. Minutes of National Assembly sessions contain detailed information about internal debates on foreign affairs and national security policy ranging from Vietnam’s assistance to the PRK regime in Cambodia to its military confrontation with China and the state of Vietnam’s economy. National Assembly oversight reports reveal new information about the contentious politics within the CPV’s crisis decision-making.

processes, showing that Vietnam's National Assembly did not simply rubber stamp the government's actions.

Taken together these collections reveal valuable new information about internal debates via minutes of top-level party and government meetings, minutes of diplomatic exchanges, and reports on domestic and foreign policy meetings circulated throughout the chain of command to and from the party's Central Committee Politburo, the Prime Minister's Office, and ministerial and provincial authorities.

An example of how internally circulated documents reveal the otherwise hidden contentious internal deliberations within the Vietnamese leadership at that time. After China’s invasion of Vietnam in February 1979, the Vietnamese leadership adopted a major national security strategy aimed at resisting the horrendous destruction in border provinces by the Chinese invasion troops. On February 11, 1980, the Government Council issued Directive 46-CP, which determined two strategic directions for the national defense in 1980. First, in a scenario in which war does not break out between Vietnam and China, key economic sectors, including transportation, telecommunications, electricity, coal mining, oil refining, and logging, were to be off-limits to state extraction for national defense. In addition, workers who operated machinery in agriculture, irrigation, construction, and so on would be exempt from military duty. However, in a scenario in which the country was at war with China, the MoD would automatically have the power to utilize the human and material resources of the nation at will, with a few restrictions, for the purpose of defending the nation against China's military aggression.

This text revealed a comparison of that time between the leadership, dominated by General Van Tien Dung of the MoD, who advocated a militarist-first policy, and the leadership of the State Planning Committee (Le Thanh Nghi and Committee Vice Tran Hoang). Historically and institutionally, the State Planning Committee was largely dominated by economically minded leaders, including Le Thanh Nghi, who tried to reduce waste and improve the efficiency of the economy. These economy-first planners were increasingly alarmed by the continued fueling of the war machine as large quantities of national resources were funneled into that machine instead of economic development.

Although the power of the military-firsters was on the rise, the economy-firsters pushed back against their increasing demands for resources in the name of national security. Such debates can be found in the up-and-down internal reports between various ministries and provincial People’s Committees (the provincial governors) and decision-making bodies within the framework of the Government Council (the executive body). In a top-secret report from the MoD.

to Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. Vice-Minister of Defense Vu Xuan Chiem lodged a thinly veiled warning: “If we do not mobilize resources at scale when [a war with China] breaks out, our forces will be drained and cut off.” Officials at the MoD have made three trips to the Ministry of Foreign Trade but did not reach an agreement.

It is not obvious why the Ministry of Foreign Trade and the leadership of Hanoi chose to avoid the demands made in this report. However, after tracing consultations to such infighting in other reports, I find from logistical log actions and summary reports from other agencies that the State Planning Committee and those senior officials in charge of economic affairs at the Prime Minister's Office (economy-firsters) were increasingly concerned about the MoD extracting far too many resources from the economy in the name of national defense. By delving into records at ministerial levels, or what could be called the “policy input level,” I was able to detect tension between the military-firsters and economy-firsters that was widespread below the surface of party unity on national security matters during this period. One of the economy-firsters, Tran Phuong, vice-chairman of the State Planning Committee, in May urged the prime minister to consider reducing quotas for allocating human and material resources for national defense and requesting urgent aid from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries to meet the basic needs of economic productivity and alleviate the Vietnamese people’s economic hardship.

Shifting Thinking

As a political history of Vietnam's domestic and foreign policy from 1975 to 1989, this book traces the evolution of Hanoi’s strategic shift from military confrontation to economic reform and opening, known as Doi Moi, at the Sixth Party Congress in 1986 and the conclusion of the Third Indochina War. The first chapters (covering the period 1975–78) examine the failure of Vietnam's socialist economic development; the middle chapters (1979–85) interrogate this shift from an economic-political focus to the military-political priorities of national security; and the final chapters (1986–89) explore the rise of Hanoi’s new strategic thinking, dubbed Doi Moi (renovation), and the importance of reconciliation with China to create a peaceful regional environment for Vietnam’s economic reform and integration in the global economy.

The most plausible explanation as to why the Vietnamese leadership’s view shifted from a focus on economic development and a broad-based foreign policy in 1975–77 to military strength and confrontation and a tacit alliance with the Soviet Union in 1978 is the disastrous failure of Vietnam’s post-1975 economic.

development. Because of the economic crisis, Politburo member and Deputy Prime Minister Le Thanh Nghi, who was the top economic planner and a close ally of Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, was largely discredited. As the bloody conflict with Cambodia and the deterioration of Sino-Vietnamese relations escalated in 1977, the militant faction led by General Secretary Le Duan, Politburo member Le Duc Tho, and their military allies in the CMC, the most powerful body in charge of Vietnam’s military policy, pushed for a decisive military action to end the military threat posed by the Sino-Cambodian alliance and for regime change in Cambodia. As early as January 1978, the CMC was planning an invasion of Cambodia, following the major counteroffensives against the Khmer Rouge forces in the second half of 1977. Its grand strategy required that Vietnam decisively shift from a balance-of-influence foreign policy to a tacit alliance with the Soviet Union to counter China’s military threat and ensure alliance support for economic and military aid before the invasion in December 1978.

The continuing military attacks on Vietnamese soil by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces and the even greater external threat that the Sino-Cambodian alliance posed to Vietnam’s national security made it necessary for the conservative faction to push for war, but this military threat alone is not sufficient to explain Vietnam’s decision to invade Cambodia in December 1978 and occupy it thereafter. I argue that what tipped the scale of the collective leadership in favor of an invasion and occupation of Cambodia is found in Vietnam’s domestic and international imperatives—that is, the socioeconomic and political crisis in 1977–78, which threatened to destabilize a newly united country and delegitimize the CPV itself, as well as Hanoi’s need to extract greater support from the Soviet Union and the Soviet-led Council of Mutual Economic Assistance to address both economic development priorities and national security threats. Vietnam’s desire to dominate Indochina provided an additional incentive for promoting regime change in Cambodia. The invasion plan was put into action in late 1978 with the approval of the economy-minded moderate leaders, including Prime Minister Pham Van Dong.

Faced with criticism from their Politburo comrades, the country's top economic planners, headed by Le Thanh Nghi, conducted an internal investigation into why the economic crisis had worsened. They came to the conclusion in December 1977 that the root cause of economic stagnation lay in wartime "old thinking"—that is, party cadres' mind-set of dependence on material resources supplied by means of massive nonrefundable aid from China, the Soviet Union, and other socialist countries. This mind-set had derailed state central planning because it generated no incentive to produce quality goods that could be exported and incentivized self-preservation behavior (e.g., an exaggerated need

for resources from the central government to meet state quotas and claims of success). Under new circumstances in which significant nonrefundable aid from the Soviet Union and China had ended and trade based on mutual interests had become the new norm, such wartime practices created a vicious cycle of shortages of raw materials and industrial equipment for the manufacture of quality products to increase exports. Without export growth and the resultant hard currency, by 1978 Vietnam had already accumulated an enormous debt, with the first payment plus interest due to the Soviet Union, Eastern European countries, and western creditors in 1979.

To resolve the financial crisis, the top economic chief, Le Thanh Nghi, called for "new thinking," that is, replacing top-down central planning with "local planning" at the district or city level. 44 With guidance from concerned authorities of the central government in Hanoi, local party leaders formulated their own economic plans, utilizing local resources and labor as the main resource and importing technology and equipment from other countries when necessary. This was a precursor to the Doi Moi policy of 1986. The idea behind decentralizing economic planning was to minimize waste, maximize the use of local resources, increase the quality and efficiency of production, and subsequently reduce foreign debt. Nonetheless, the economic crisis had crippled the economy-first faction's voices within the decision-making circle. The military-first faction was emboldened as the threat to national security that China and its Cambodian ally posed grew imminent after the DK's major attacks against Vietnam intensified during the second half of 1977. In his report to the Party Central Committee in December 1977, Le Thanh Nghi took personal responsibility for the economic crisis. 45 Eventually he was even stripped of his membership in the Party Central Committee in 1982.

Internal records show that Hanoi had three strategic objectives in Cambodia. 46 First, the overthrow of the DK regime in Cambodia was designed to deal a crushing blow to China's influence in Indochina once and for all. Second, the change of regime in Cambodia was also intended to ensure that a pro-Vietnam regime in the aftermath of genocide, similar to the one in Laos, would be long indebted to Vietnam's assistance and thereby would accept Vietnam's leadership role in Indochina. Third, Vietnam was to again proclaim itself the de facto leader of the socialist countries in Indochina and dominate the newly established Indochinese economic region, 47 including economic planning and oversight of international assistance for nation building in Cambodia in the aftermath of the Pol Pot genocidal regime.

Following the invasion, the Hanoi-installed PRK proved to be a rather difficult client state of Vietnam, having little resemblance to a conventional.

partron-clien relationship, Behind the public display of camaraderie, Vietnam's patron-client relationship with Cambodia reveals contentious differences between the two countries over issues such as sharing the burden of support for foreign occupying forces in Vietnam, territorial boundaries, transshipment of foreign aid to Cambodia via Vietnam, exploitation of Cambodia's natural resources, and the increasingly hostile relationship between Vietnamese troops and some segments of the Cambodian populace. However, documentary evidence in Vietnamese archives, as I discuss in detail below, shows that Hanoi exerted overwhelming influence over domestic and foreign policy in Cambodia in the 1980s. In addition, Vietnam gained nearly exclusive trade access to the rich natural resources, including forests, fisheries, fertile rice paddies, and rubber, of its two smaller neighbors, Cambodia and Laos. Documentary evidence strongly suggests that Hanoi's primary motive was to exploit the Indochinese economic subregion in order to bolster Vietnam's long-term objective of economic modernization. By the same token, during the Third Indochina War, Vietnam became the de facto sheriff of Indochina, deputized by the Soviet Union. Vietnam became the main interlocutor for Cambodia and Laos in the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), assuming far-reaching responsibilities, including economic planning and negotiations for foreign aid from the Soviet Union and other COMECON members on Cambodia's behalf. In Cambodia, as in Laos, the Vietnamese were advisers in chief in major fields ranging from foreign affairs and the economy to internal security at the district level.

In 1979-80, Vietnamese leadership's strategic thinking shifted from quick military victory to long-term militarization of the Vietnamese nation in a two-front war in Cambodia and against China. In 1980-85, Hanoi militarized the entire nation, subordinating economic development to the primacy of military confrontation with China and building a pro-Vietnam PRK in Cambodia in the aftermath of the genocide and national destruction conducted by the DK. The Council of Government's Decision 58-CP gave the MoD extraordinary power to extract material resources, manpower, and technological and professional assets from the national economy in support of Vietnam's two-front war. During this period, Vietnam achieved its aim of drawing economic and military aid worth US$4.5 billion from the Soviet Union, a reward for Vietnam's ironclad alliance with the latter. 49 Nonetheless, the economic pain of the entire nation resulting from the military confrontation with China, combined with the heavy cost of nation building and protracted military intervention in Cambodia, stifled Vietnam's economic growth in spite of massive aid from the Soviet Union and other COMECON countries.

By the end of 1980, one year into Vietnam's military intervention in Cambodia, it had become clear to Hanoi that China's strategy in Cambodia was to bleed the Vietnamese occupying force there and harass Vietnam from the north. In 1983 MOFA, under Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, pushed for a political solution, beginning with a diplomatic offensive intended to isolate China, the China-backed Khmer Rouge, and other resistance factions in Cambodia. The strategy was to demonstrate to ASEAN Indochina's preference for dialogue over confrontation. 50 In the same year, a top-secret report by MOFA revealed that "[Cambodian] Foreign Minister Hun Sen has trusted us [Vietnamese] more in our grand strategy of partial troop withdrawal from Cambodia to pressure Thailand and China to cut their aid to the Cambodian resistance forces."51 The report noted, "Hun Sen previously expressed strong concern" about Vietnam's first phase of withdrawal of its troops in July 1982.

The Vietnamese occupying forces' major summer offensives in 1984-85 intended to break the backbone of the Cambodian resistance forces was designed to turn victory on the battlefield into political and diplomatic leverage in the international arena, a classic military-diplomatic offensive strategy of the Vietnamese revolutionaries when they were contemplating a political compromise with their formidable enemy. On August 10, 1985, the two Politburos of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party and the CPV held a joint meeting in Hanoi. They agreed on Vietnam's plan to withdraw all its troops from Cambodia by 1990. 52 The old guard, namely, Le Duan, Truong Chinh, Pham Van Dong, and Le Duc Tho, had already agreed on a major shift from military confrontation during the preceding six years to a political solution before the consequential Eleventh Conference of Foreign Ministers held in Phnom Penh on August 15-16, 1985. 53 Yet they also warned against so-called peaceful evolution, referring to the threat of western political and economic ideas to the socialist system. 54 The Vietnamese conservatives and their military-first allies must have been alarmed and shocked when observing Gorbachev's rejection of the longstanding Stalinist worldview of the "two-camps" and the doctrine of "military strength" around this time. On the other hand, reformists like Nguyen Co Thach saw the rise of Gorbachev and his "new thinking" worldview of global interdependence and cooperation with the West as an affirmation of their own new thinking. Combined with such a reckoning and the transformation in the Soviet Union in 1985-86, the threat of a prolonged and costly two-front military confrontation provided the political space for early reformists like Nguyen Co Thach to resurrect their post-Paris Peace Accords new thinking of 1973-a less ideological and more broad-based foreign policy, which also required reconciliation with China and the West. 

In 1987 Phan Doan Nam, a theoretician and senior adviser to Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, attributed the shift in Vietnam's foreign policy from socialist internationalism, closely aligned with the Soviet Union, to a broader engagement with the world capitalist system after the 1986 Sixth Party Congress to one key element of Ho Chi Minh's thought on foreign policy and international relations: "Align the strength of the nation with the power of the age." This philosophical belief came to influence the political report of the Sixth National Congress in 1986, which in turn guided Vietnam's multidirectional foreign policy. The "power of the age," as Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach elaborated in 1986, refers to the quy luat phat trien (law of development) at a critical juncture in human history. He argued, "This law determines the survival trajectory of a nation regardless of its political system and its future development. Great and small powers alike would lag behind if their leaders failed to align their national strength with the global trend."57 Such structural changes required that Vietnam revise its concepts of national security, shifting the focus from political-military to political-economic strength. 

Consequential military and economic threats to Vietnam's national security, rather than Marxist-Leninist ideology or a political culture of hegemony, drove Hanoi's decision to invade Cambodia and occupy it from 1979 to 1988. The shift of collective ideas within the Vietnamese Politburo from a focus on socialist economic development in 1976-78 to massive military confrontation with China and China-backed Cambodian resistance forces in 1979 was caused by the duality of an economic crisis at home and military threats posed by the Sino-Khmer Rouge alliance. Simply put, material factors, rather than ideological or cultural ones, caused the shift in collective ideas and consequently a corresponding change in Vietnam's national security policy. Vietnam's costly two-front war in Cambodia and against China along its northern border during the first half of the 1980s, combined with entrenched economic hardship at home and the emergent collective belief by 1985 that the Soviet bloc's economic and technological development was lagging behind that of the West, made it possible for the newly empowered reformists' ideas to gain wide acceptance among members of the old guard. These reformist ideas were translated into the Doi Moi policy in 1986.